Farewell Nicaragua, Hello Costa Rica.

At last check, we were in Granada enjoying the sites and sounds of a city more European than Central American. Currently, we´re wet and happy in Costa Rica. How did this happen I hear you ask, all will be revealed, we might even have some pictures of us in the blog! Dnnnn Dnnnn Dnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn...

So, leaving Granada, we got a bus and a Ferry to Isla Ometepe which is a volcanic island in the middle of Lake Nicaragua.

We had heard that there was a hostel run by an Irish guy there and it was supposed to be pretty good craic. We decided that we´d like to hear a familiar voice and off we went in the direction of Little
Morgan´s. We shared a taxi to the place with a bunch of Dutch girls (there was to be no bus for several hours.) On arriving to Little Morgan´s we were greeted by what can only be described as a biblical plague of flies.

Saioules (sic.) are little flies the size of a midgie fly and they live for a short 24 hours and then die. Upon dying the smell like rotting fish. When they are alive, the live in huge swarms and they get in your eyes, nose, mouth. In your clothes, they´re so small they fall through mosquito nets so your bed is constantly covered in a layer of them.

So, when we get to Little Morgans, we can´t really see or anything, we´re greeted by the lovely Tess who sends us up to the Mirador. The Mirador is a viewing tower, and because its a bit higher up, we were saved the worst of the flies. Unfortunately, we were stuck in the tower. So we quickly aquainted ourselves with the owner, Morgan and some of the other guests over a few bottle of beers. There was little else you could do but drink that first day. From the tower you could see big brown clouds of the flies coming in off the lake. You also got a spectacular view of the sunset which we definately took advantage of.

After a terrible night´s sleep eating flies, we decided the best thing to do would be to get up at 6.30am and climb the volcano from the bottom. With a pair of sore heads we headed up the volcano with a group of German guys and our guide. It was the first time we climbed a volcano from the very bottom, no lift to a starting point. The starting point is across the road from the hostel, right on the lake.

For the first time, we weren´t powering ahead of everyone else all the time! It was by far the hardest hike we´ve done so far. The path was muddy and slippy, it went up then down then up and then up again. Most of the time there was only space to walk single file, and I´ve never sweated so much in my life. The heat wasn´t as bad as it had been on other hikes, but the sheer physical exersion needed to get through the mud on a uphill climb was a lot.

We walked through people´s back gardens and banana plantations, through small rivers, cow paths and small mudflows! It was gruelling. Its exactly what I´d expect from hiking through a jungle, the guide literally had a machete for clearing the path ahead of us. There were howler monkeys growling down at us and humming birds zipping around us. The climb was breathtaking. Litterally, you were very much out of breath a lot of the way up!

Once you get to the very top, you´re not actually done yet because you climb down to a lake in the middle of the volcano.

The view is quite nice, and a few people were bold enough to swim in it. Personally, I just ate my sandwich and enjoyed the view, I was too relieved to move! the view of the lake is nice, but not exactly breathtaking. Its not what you get up at 6.30 and climb for 4 hours to see. After a healthy lunch of fly sandwiches, (a rat tried to steal Ian's sandwich), we started back down the volcano. Which actually meant climbing back up to the top and then back down. We were about half way down the volcano when we came to the view that you get up at 6.30 and climb for 6 hours to see.

Its a perfect view of the second volcano on the island with Lake Nicaragua on either side. At this point myself and Ian were way ahead of the group having regained our mojo over lunch. Ian came out of the undergrowth ahead of me and all I heard was ´Oh Wow!` I was wondering what Ian was seeing when I emerged from the jungle and was caught by the sight myself. ´Oh Wow!´  is an understatement. Every single person as they came through that path had the exact same reaction, allbeit in different languages, but the sentiment was the same. We sat there admiring the view for a half an hour unable to move.

On coming closer to home we realised that the flies were still hanging around the hostel in their millions. Brushing against a banana leaf would remind hundreds of them that they were still alive and all of a sudden you were surrounded by the little bastards again. Up your nose, in your eyes and ears, I don´t even want to tell you what the toilets and showers were like, needless to say there was a layer of rotting flies an inch thick covering everything. If the billions of flies didn´t get to you, the smell certainly would.

Our newest ozzy friends (Nathan & Melanie) had had enough and moved to a hostel on higher ground. Myself and Ian toughed it out for one more night but decided we were also fed up and arranged to meet the ozzies at the 7.30 bus to head to fairer shores.

After an extremely painless trip, we arrived at San Juan del Sur, a beach town on the pacific side of Nicaragua only a half hour from the Costa Rican border. We have no pictures from San Juan because we immediately fell into a pattern of surfing during the day, and playing cards and cooking at night. For three days we surfed and cooked and played cards with Nath and Mel. On the fourth day, while the two boys went off surfing, myself and Mel had a girlie day. We ate ice cream and decided where we would go in Costa Rica the next day. That evening we did something pretty special though. We all sat in the back of a pick up for an hour down dirt roads that are really more rivers. At 9.30ish we arrived at a beach that is also a turtle reserve.

Soldiers with big guns wandered around us as we walked down the path to the beach. The soldiers weren´t there for our protection but for the turtle. This beach is where hundreds of thousands of endangered sea turtles come to nest every year. According to our guide, every species of sea turtle is currently endangered, and this particular beach is where thousands of Olive Ridley turtles nest.

As soon as we walked down the beach we could see an odd track in the sand that came from the sea and stopped at a big dark thing that we couldn´t really see properly. Following our guide, we came upon a turtle building her nest and laying her eggs. We sat there with her until she had finshed and watched as she closed in the nest and patted it down. That part was actually my favourite, she does a little dance on the top of the nest to make sure its well and truely covered and then does a dance around it to hide the nest a bit. Then she turns right around and heads back to the sea. Sea Turtles are surprisingly quick on the land, I mean, they´re completely helpless, but they´re a  lot faster than you´d imagine!

I don´t know how many people get to see turtles nesting, but I´m very lucky to be one of them. That night we watched two turtles nesting, and all in all, it was one of the coolest things I´ve ever seen. It wasn´t adrenaline pumping like some of the other things we´ve done. I think you might have to see it to understand what it feels like, its difficult to explain. In any case, although it was quite the expensive trip (30USD), it was worth every penny.

Here we say goodbye to Nicaragua and hello to Costa Rica. We walked the kilometer across the border, with the Nicaraguan governement wishing us well. As Mel pointed out, they´re probably obliged to wish you well at this point given the amount of money they take off you in immigration fees!

On arriving in Costa Rica, we headed straight for the beach town called Samara. I should also mention that by now we´ve adopted Nath and Mel as travelling companions. They´re headed the same way as us for the next while and they share the same love of cheap and cheerful travelling as well as card games.

When we fnially get to Samara after one taxi and three buses we all sit down for a well desereved break in a coffee shop. This is where we met the lovely ladies. The two ladies working at this coffee shop were the friendliest women you could ever meet, they were really concerned about where we were going to stay. When the two boys came back from scouting out all the local accommodation, they let us know that it was a good safe place to stay.

We ended up on a beach front dorm with our own balcony overlooking the bay. We spent the next few days in a familiar routine, surfing, cooking and playing cards. Although, the one night we broke out the catchphrase, things got out of hand, there was celebratory table dancing when Team Wo-Man kicked Team Man´s Ass twice in a row.

Ian and Nath were surfing constantly. I preferred playing in the waves being photographer to the surfers. I think the results were pretty good given that my camera is so rubbish that I was in the waves up to my waist to get a decent picture of surf pro O`Gorman.

Ian´s poor attempt at Surf Photography.

When we realised that the weather was not really holding up for us, we decided to head inland to Monte Verde. (Which incidentally means Green Hill in Spanish).

So as you may or may not realise, normally they way myself and Ian decide where to go is we talk to everyone we met and see what they say about a place. If we hear good things, we check out the guidebook and make our way there. The plan is very loose really, and we more or less go off of people´s suggestions. When we talked to people about Costa Rica, we heard two things. One, Costa Rica is very expensive and more importantly, every single person we talked to recommended was Zip Lining in Monte Verde. We have not been disappointed.

When we got to Monte Verde, we were greeted off the bus by the lovely Ronny who took us to his hostel ´Sleepers Sleep Cheaper´. Don´t be fooled by the name, its the best place we´ve stayed at so far, and definately the best value. We´ve been getting free breakfast, brilliant kitchen, free internet, television, blankets. And best of all, HOT SHOWERS! Travelling around, I´ve come to realise that the two things I take for granted the most at home are probably hot showers and washing machines.

Anyway, once in Monte Verde, not happy with your usual zip lining tours, we signed up for the Extremo Canopy tour. Extremo is not an exaggeration. Ian reckons its the single most fun thing we´ve done. So we got up early and headed to Extremo base camp and got all kitted up.


Anna and Ian kitted up.

Team Man kitted up.

Team Man on return.

Ian and Anna on return.

To say we got wet and muddy is something of an understatement. We went across 15 zipline cables, 1 tarzan swing, 1 rapel and one of those cables was in the fashion of superman. For those who don´t know what zip lining is, its basically attaching yourself to a cable with a complicated system of levers and pulleys and hurtling through the jungle very fast.  A tarzan swing is literally swinging like tarzan from a cable. A rapel is just jumping off a platform with a rope, and superman is where you go on the cables headfirst.

Why would you pay to do this to yourself I hear you ask? Well to be honest I asked myself that a fair few times too. There were times when I´ve never been so scared in my entire life, (Even more so than the wasp attack) and I literally had to be pused off a few of the ledges. I had a mantra that got me through some of the scarier zip lines `I´m very well tied in, I´m very well tied in, I´m very well tied in`.

Going along the zip lines, the mist was so heavy that you couldn´t see the ground or the cable, and when you were getting to the end of the cable, the ground would just come up out of nowhere at you very very fast! The best one was the superman. I can only describe it as flying. You literally feel like you´re soaring through the clouds flying. The superman cable is a kilometer long and its incredible. The adrenaline rush at the end left me somewhere between a fit of laghter and tears and definately all limbs shaking. It was a truely strange experience.

So that´s us for the moment. We´re heading to the Carribean side of Costa Rica tomorrow and from there we´ll be making our way to Panama. We´re sticking with the wonderful travel companions Nath and Mel for the next while, hopefully they´re not sick of us yet.

Nicaragua: Land of Revolutionaries, Rocking Chairs and Cowboys.

Welcome back to yet another updated blog post. When we left you last, we were trucking through Honduras about to hit Nicaragua. Well, we hit Nicaragua and Nicaragua hit us! The thing about Nicaragua is, if it hasn't been blown up in a civil war, destroyed by volcanoes or earthquakes or devasted by hurricanes, you are not in Nicaragua. Not that any of that gets the Nica's down, oh no! They're an upbeat people considering their recent history.

So, we arrived tired from 2 days on buses and decided to stop immediately in Ocotal. Its a small town just over the border with a pretty square and friendly people. When we asked some shopkeepers where was good to eat they entered into a 20 minute discussion trying to figure out the best place for us to eat. It was quite funny, we hadn`t seen any other gringos for so long that the day we left Ocotal when we saw a bunch of Americans, we couldn`t stop staring. What were these tourists doing in the middle of nowhere? We stared for so long that they had to talk to us or it would have been really awkward. Turns out they were missionaries travelling around some of the smaller towns.

Not a lot going on in Ocotal though, so we pushed off for Estelli. Estelli, a lot like Ocotal but bigger. We`ve now been in Nicaragua for two days and the two things that are most apparent in Nicaraguan society are rocking chairs and revolutionaries. Nicaraguans love their rocking chairs. Every house has about ten rocking chairs in their front porch and the locals love to sit outside nattering away all day and all night. That and their revolutionaries, This is particularly obvious in the Northern part of the country which was heavily involved in the fighting in the recent wars. You can see bullet holes in some of the buildings, and the bigger towns all seem to have museums dedicated to the martyrs of the revoutionaries, which are run by the mothers of the dead.

We again moved quickly to the lovely colonial town of Leòn which was very pretty. One of the big attrations of Leòn is not only the interesting architecture, pacific beaches but also the nearby Cerro Negro.

Cerro Negro is Central America`s youngest Volcano. Its not very high, not a difficult hike, maybe 30 mins or so. But when you get to the top, you can smell the sulfer, see the steam and feel the heat coming off the volcano. If you put your hands in the ground for more than 4 seconds and they will be burned. But its not the walk up thats the interesting bit, lovely and all as it is. What's really interesting is how you get back down. Leòn is the home of `Volcano Boarding`, which is a little bit like snow boarding or sledding down a volcano. People have reached speeds of up to 80km/hour sledding down this volcano. That`s faster than what the average bus travels at. (Which by my estimation is about 10km/hour.) Its pretty quick. So Ian and myself spent 40 mins hiking up this volcano then we got into our orange jumpsuits - yes we did look like inmates in an American television show. After a brief 10 minutes of instruction on how not to smash your face on the way down, we readied ourselves for the big plunge. Sitting on the top of a volcano about to slide down it is intimidating, I`ve never been skiing, but I imagine its something like going down a big slope for the first time. Except that if you fall off or put your hands out you`ll be completely cut up by the lava rocks which you`re sliding down.

 Again, not us, but you get the idea.

Now what everyone wants to know is who went faster? Well, I`ll have to disappoint you, it wasn`t Ian. Actually, we both hit 50km/hour on the way down. Its quite scary, but there are a few simple things to remember, keep your back traight so you`re well balanced, that way you won`t fall off. Also keep your mouth closed unless you`d like to eat the volcano, which would be a bit like chewing a gas bbq. The ride down is fast and scary and exhillirating. By the time you get down, you're covered in lava rocks, right down to your underwear and yet, all you want to do is go again.

After being given a celebration can of beer each by the guide, we piled back into the big open truck to head back to town. We were all having a brilliant time, chatting about how much fun it had been when all of a sudden a bunch of what I though were leaves came in the back of the truck. I look over and Ian is making a mad dash to jump out of the back of the still moving truck. Its at this time that I start to realise that my legs feel like someone has thrown a pot of boiling water on them. I look down and realise that there`s a nest of wasps currently waging war on me. Thats when I also ran and jumped out of the back of the truck and ran down the road screaming until I found Ian, who was by this point waspless. It took me a few minutes to realise that I was still screaming and no one else was. It was the first time in my life that I had been completely hysterical, actually dictionary definition of hysterical.

The wasps dispersed and we headed back to the truck me still shaking quite a bit. I got the worst of the wasps stings. Ian had about 10 and the guy next to him had about 10. I had 40 or 50 stings on my knees, it felt like I had been scalded and my knee was swelling. It was the ozzy guy sitting next to me that had it really bad. He only had 5 or 6 stings, but it turns out he was allergic. He had to make a trip to hospital. I was limping for two days because my knee was so swollen. But we got ourselves together and decided to head off to the beach on the Pacific. We spent a few days on the beach at Las Penitas playing in the waves, body boarding and generally having a good time.

At this point, I'd just like to tell you a little bit about the chicken buses here. They're old american school buses, very often with the name of the high school still written on the side. They're called chicken buses because the locals bring all kinds of things including chickens on the buses. We've been keeping track of funny things that people bring on the buses, from a 2 year supply of rice to a basket of live crabs. The funniest thing we've seen so far was a man who brought a tree trunk the length of the bus onto the bus with him. Everyone had to climb over the tree to get on and off the bus. I don't think you'd get away with a suitcase on Dublin Bus, not to mind a basket of crabs or a whole tree.

When we left Las Penitas, we made that fatefull decision to go to a volcano crater called Cosiguina. The shortened version is that we spent 2 days getting to the middle of nowhere, and surprisingly there wasn't anyone in the middle of nowhere. Turns out the mother of woman who owns the hostel we were supposed to stay at was sick. She told us unfortunately they were closed and she couldn't look after us. Stranded as we were in the middle of nowhere, we got straight back on a bus for another 8 or so hours and ended up right where we'd started.

 Where we were supposed to end up.

At this point we were actually getting a bit sick of buses having spent 10 of the previous 14 days on chicken buses. So we decided to hit up some more of Nicaragua's famed Pacific beaches. We got the 5 hour bus to Pochomil and landed in the land that time forgot. Remember that episode of The Simpsons where Bart goes to the world fair and arrives 50 years too late? Its supposed to be amazing and all that's left is a falling down theme park? That's exactly what Pochomil is. Somebody told the locals that if they built restaurants and bars they'd make loads of money off the tourists, but no tourists ever came. The place is crumbling and falling apart and the locals have absolutely nothing. When you get off the bus they crowd around you as if you're the first tourist (Nica or Gringo) to have turned up to this place in the last ten years. It was actually intimidating and very uncomfortable. The first time we've really felt like that since we've come away.

We had had enough. We went straight to Managua airport and got on the next flight to the Corn Islands. We took a holiday from our holiday and landed in paradise. There are two islands that make up the Corn Islands, Big Corn and Little Corn. We spent a full week just on Little Corn and it was by far the best place we've ever been. We stayed in a place called La Casa Iguana, we had our own litle cabin that looked over a sandy white beach and water so clear you could see where the coral was for miles. The snorkelling was fantastic, we could swim out to the reef and spend hours looking at the life. The water was actually too hot sometimes, and you'd have to swim to the bottom to cool off. We did 5 dives there, 2 on a sea stack about 16km out from the island. Honduras has nothing on Little Corn diving. The rock formations, the cavern systems, the sharks, the life was spectacular.

Big Corn and the view from the Casa Iguana on Little Corn.

One of the best things about Little Corn was the brilliant and funny people we met there. Cole our Dive Guide and her lovely assistant Kate (Dive Master in Training) were both from New York and diving with them was like diving with the mafia. Every briefing was in mafia speak and we were informed we would be 'swiming with the fishes'. The way these two girls went, you'd swear their weight belts were made of guns or concrete boots! That said, Cole was by far the best and most professional Dive Guide we've had. From the minute we stepped off the boat, Brandon (Aka Sponge) was there looking after us and generally having a laugh with us.

If anyone is looking to get away from it all, go to Little Corn Island and stay at the Casa Iguana. You'll be well fed with fresh Barracuda and Lobster regular meals. There is one footpath down the island, but mostly its just dirt paths along the island, which means no cars, motorbikes or other such nuisances. Little Corn island is the postcard definition of paradise.

So that brings us to Granada (the city in Nicaragua not the island). Granada is a lot like Leon, a beautiful old colonial city thats starting to crumble a little. Its as if you're in a part of Europe that had a lot of money but doesn't any more and the granduer is starting to fade a little. That said, Granada, like Leon had been fantastic.

So this is where we leave you, on our way to Isla Ometepe in Lake Nicaragua. Would you believe that we're a quarter of our way through our trip already? Its been 3 months, 5 countries, 7 cans of insect repellent, 5 bottles of suncream and a lot of laughs so far.